Social Pediatrics

Social Pediatrics is a scientific discipline that supports the healthy life of the child. Today, the approach of preventive and developmental medicine is becoming increasingly important. Ensuring medical care and taking measures against conditions that cause disease, improving preventive health services, and emphasizing the priority of preventive and developmental health services in health policies are of great importance for child and public health. With this understanding, Social Pediatrics is a discipline that determines the impact of family, society, education, economic status, and health policies on the child and their health.

Our country is among those with a high child population. Physicians working in the field of Social Pediatrics take part and provide consultancy in many programs carried out by the Ministry of Health to improve child health, such as the support of breastfeeding and baby-friendly hospital programs, prevention of vaccine-preventable diseases, nutrition during childhood, and the prevention of abuse and accidents.

The objective of the program is defined as ensuring that the candidate graduating from the Social Pediatrics PhD program possesses a significant amount of knowledge in their field; can give seminars and lectures related to their subject of study, plan independent research, perform applications, publish articles in scientific journals, provide opinions in scientific meetings, give satisfactory answers when consulted, follow innovations, demographic data, and the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, and make assumptions about the future of the subject. Furthermore, they should know what a publication should include and how to present data to turn the data obtained in their studies into publications in national and international "peer-reviewed journals." They should have a high level of literature knowledge on the subject they study, follow current publications related to this subject, and have a level of knowledge that can produce publications acceptable with a new perspective on the subject through the hypotheses they develop.

In conclusion, the Social Pediatrics PhD program is of great importance in the development of child health services as a program that will train pediatricians who will carry out many preventive medicine services, especially child health monitoring in the field, vaccination, child neglect, and abuse, and will contribute to the academic world with their scientific studies in this field.